It may be desirable for a client device to rapidly access data files located on a server. High-quality access of data files over the Internet may require the ability to download data as fast as it is being consumed by a client device (or faster, to provide a margin of safety).
Current hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) implementations support byte-range requests, which can permit a client device to submit a large number of relatively small data requests (e.g., 64K bytes). While this data acquisition method can be used to provide a client device with the ability to randomly access a data file stored on a server without requiring the entire data file to be downloaded, such a scheme can multiply the cost of network latency, thereby compromising download speed.
One of the most well-supported ways to download data over the public Internet is to use HTTP over transmission control protocol (TCP). TCP has built in adaptive congestion control mechanisms to efficiently transmit data to the client device responsive to requests for large amounts of data. Given a large amount of data to transmit to a client device using TCP, a server can progressively increase the transfer rate until the bandwidth limit of the connection is reached. Unfortunately, HTTP/TCP bulk transfer is not optimized for small byte-range requests since the use of many small requests to transfer data multiplies the per-request cost of network latency.